Les Johnson: Going Interstellar

“Okay. Let’s say you’re right. We work hard for the next fifty years to establish a colony that will someday mature to the point that our children’s children will have won back what we will have lost. Great. But we’ll be dead in fifty years. It doesn’t have to be that way. We’ve already lived almost a thousand years and we can live another thousand! And that thousand won’t be hard! We can continue to live like kings. I enjoyed being in VR. It sure as hell beats what we’ll face down there.”

Up to this point, Herndon’s part of the argument had been more intellectual than emotional. With Vasquez’s last words, his demeanor changed. He leaned forward and stared at his commander with intensity.

“Commander, are you suggesting we not wake everyone up and just go back to sleep? You think we should just forget about why we’re here and go back to our VR dreams? You can’t be serious. That’s not living! That’s why most of us left Earth in the first place!”

Vasquez stared at Herndon, then at the deck. He slowly raised his head.

“No, Mack, you’re right. We’re here to colonize and colonize is what we’ll do. I don’t know what I was thinking. Let’s get the ship ready and then start waking everyone up.” Vasquez nodded and appeared to accede to Herndon’s argument.

“Thank you, Captain,” Herndon said. He turned away, probably to return to a duty station. Vasquez stared after him and the look of accommodation changed. His features hardened with rage. Rage and determination.

Goss watched in horror as Commander Vasquez reached inside his tunic and withdrew what looked like a piece of computer cabling or a wire harness. He wrapped both ends around his fists, keeping a good foot of bare wire between his outstretched hands. He slowly walked up behind Herndon, who was now totally engrossed in his own thoughts, and garroted him. Took him down where he stood.

Herndon collapsed almost without a struggle. For Goss, who to this point had only seen death in virtual reality, it was both gruesome and captivating. He couldn’t avert his eyes until after Vasquez let the lifeless body of his second-in-command fall to the floor. Vasquez showed no remorse. He strode back to the command chair and spoke to the AI.

“Plot a course to our next destination and prepare to leave orbit. Prepare my sleep chamber and upload VR set twenty-seven. I rather enjoyed that one.”

Horrified, Goss watched Vasquez work from his command chair for another five minutes, apparently performing all the routine systems checks required for the ship to begin yet another long voyage between the stars. Vasquez never again looked at Herndon’s body.

Goss stopped the holographic playback and stared at the floor where the corpse had lain. Herndon had died about a thousand years ago and Goss wondered where the body had been put and what Vasquez must have been thinking when he disposed of it. Had he done it before going back to sleep or had he removed whatever had remained of the body when they arrived at Tau Ceti three hundred years later?

After all that time, the body might have still been there, relatively intact, since the ship powered down all the life support to subfreezing temperatures during interstellar cruise. Or it might have been nothing more than dust that the maintenance robots had long-since cleaned up and recycled. Goss might never know.

It’s tempting , Goss thought. A thousand years of simulated living versus only another fifty of real life. But that’s not really living. Goss now knew what he had to do.

“AI, can I reprogram everyone’s VR sims? Can I overlay something or weave into what they’re experiencing some sort of theme or plot?”

“Yes, as the new commander, you have the authorization to make such changes.”

“Good. Overwrite every single VR simulation, even my own, with a series of real-life, day-by-day experiences of the average person, beginning around the year 1500. Use the historical databases. Don’t make anyone absolutely miserable, but let them experience real life, real work, real love and loss. Let them experience the progression of life from one era to the next until they get close to the time in which we left Earth.”

With any luck, when we reach Tau Ceti and wake up, we’ll be ready to keep living a real life—and to start a new one.

I (Les) have been reading Ben’s work since I was in high school and he was editing Omni Magazine . I read his stories in Analog and cut my science fiction teeth on his Kinsman saga. I never thought I would actually be collaborating with him professionally. Yes, I am a fan.

He began his writing career working as a technical writer for Project Vanguard and quickly surpassed the pace of the real space program by writing realistic stories of space exploration that have taken his readers beyond the Moon and into deep space.

In “A Country for Old Men,” Ben takes us on an interstellar journey and demonstrates that we sometimes place too much faith in technology when a touch of honest duplicity is called for.

“It’s obvious!”said Vartan Gregorian, standing imperiously before the two others seated on the couch. “I’m the best damned pilot in the history of the human race!”

Planting his fists on his hips, he struck a pose that was nothing less than preening.

Half buried in the lounge’s plush curved couch, Alexander Ignatiev bit back an impulse to laugh in the Armenian’s face. But Nikki Deneuve, sitting next to him, gazed up at Gregorian with shining eyes.

Breaking into a broad grin, Gregorian went on, “This bucket is moving faster than any ship ever built, no? We’ve flown farther from Earth than anybody ever has, true?”

Nikki nodded eagerly as she responded, “Forty percent of lightspeed and approaching six light years.”

“So, I’m the pilot of the fastest, highest-flying ship of all time!” Gregorian exclaimed. “That makes me the best flier in the history of the human race. QED!”

Ignatiev shook his head at the conceited oaf. But he saw that Nikki was captivated by his posturing. Then it struck him. She loves him! And Gregorian is showing off for her.

The ship’s lounge was as relaxing and comfortable as human designers back on Earth could make it. It was arranged in a circular grouping of sumptuously appointed niches, each holding high curved banquettes that could seat up to half a dozen close friends in reasonable privacy.

Ignatiev had left his quarters after suffering still another defeat at the hands of the computerized chess program and snuck down to the lounge in mid-afternoon, hoping to find it empty. He needed a hideaway while the housekeeping robots cleaned his suite. Their busy, buzzing thoroughness drove him to distraction; it was impossible to concentrate on chess or anything else while the machines were dusting, laundering, straightening his rooms, restocking his autokitchen and his bar, making the bed with crisply fresh linens.

So he sought refuge in the lounge, only to find Gregorian and Denueve already there, in a niche beneath a display screen that showed the star fields outside. Once the sight of those stars scattered across the infinite void would have stirred Ignatiev’s heart. But not any more, not since Sonya died.

Sipping at the vodka that the serving robot had poured for him the instant he had stepped into the lounge, thanks to the robot’s face recognition program, Ignatiev couldn’t help grousing, “And who says you are the pilot, Vartan? I didn’t see any designation for pilot in the mission’s assignment roster.”